(CNN) -- Many computer engineers consider a job

offer from Google as the golden ticket.

Outdoor volleyball courts, free gourmet food, on-site
haircuts, massages and laundry are among the
perks Google has offered its employees at its main
campus in Mountain View, California.
But some of the people who do leave are
challenging the company in the best way an
engineer knows how: by developing programs that
could detract from Google's core business.
Brian Kennish worked at Google for seven years,
managing teams of engineers on a variety of
products such as the Chrome browser and the
moribund Google Wave.
Near the end of his stint at Google, Kennish
developed a browser extension for Chrome called
Facebook Disconnect.
The software blocks websites that have Facebook
widgets installed from automatically sending
information about the user back to the social
networking company. Facebook Disconnect has
75,000 users, Kennish said.
"No one at Google asked me to do it," Kennish told
CNN this week.
What sparked Kennish's project, he said, was
reading the recent scrutiny of online data-collection
tactics chronicled by news organizations. The Wall
Street Journal has been running a series called
"What They Know," and CNN had its own last week
called "End of Privacy."
While Facebook and the applications that run on its
platform can be considered personal-data hoarders,
Kennish eventually realized his then-employer was,
itself, among the biggest collectors.
To name a few practices, Google can track search
queries over time, target ads to its Gmail users
based on the contents of e-mails, and use a
person's location data to determine which shops' ads
it will show. Google, like many Web advertising
companies, uses small files called cookies to track
internet surfing habits in order to better target ads.
"I never worked directly with user data," Kennish
said of his time at Google. "I didn't have a good
sense of what was being collected. Privacy wasn't a
passion of mine or something that I knew a lot about
until basically two months ago, when I started
reading about this stuff."
Kennish left Google in November to focus more on
programs that empower people to take control of
their privacy online.
"I had this holy-cow moment when I realized what
was going on," Kennish said. "There's just so much
unknown about what's being done with this data."
"I think there is a good reason to be concerned with
it all and, frankly, to be fearful of it," he said.
Last week, he released a second browser extension,
another tool for Google Chrome, called Disconnect.
Once installed, the program blocks major internet
companies, including Google, from installing cookies
on -- and thus tracking -- a computer.
People using Disconnect can decide which cookies
they'd like to allow onto their system. Cookies can
be helpful when, for example, you'd like a website to
remember your login credentials and not ask for
them every time you visit.
"I would like to see us move to a point where all the
data that's collected about folks is intentional," rather
than without people's knowledge, Kennish said. "So
if I give you permission to collect my data, then go
ahead and do it."
In its first week, 25,000 people downloaded
Disconnect. Kennish is releasing a new version
Friday that lets users choose whether Google can
personalize search queries based on the data it has
about the person. By default, Disconnect blocks
Google from doing this.
"Any data that's collected has the potential to escape
the collector," Kennish said. "So I would like to see
Google only collect data that I explicitly allow them
to collect."
Google hosts a dashboard for users to review a
breakdown of the messages and information
attached to their accounts. The Google Privacy
Center provides information on how the company
collects data and lets people, whether they're
registered with Google or not, opt out of ad and
analytics tracking.
Michael Gundlach, another ex-Google engineer,
developed an alternative to complicated opt-out
systems that vary between ad networks. Like
Disconnect, it's a browser extension, and there are
versions for Chrome and Apple's Safari.
Called AdBlock, Gundlach's program can prevent
Web pages from loading and displaying ads. That
includes Google's ads, which account for the vast
majority of the search giant's revenue.
AdBlock offers a setting to easily enable ads from
Gundlach's former employer, though those ads are
disabled by default. "Google didn't ask me to put that
in," Gundlach wrote in an e-mail. "I find Google text
ads to be useful."
Still, Gundlach says he blocks most ads because "I
don't wish to be bombarded by consumerism."
The real economic conundrum: If website visitors
don't pay figuratively -- by watching ads or by having
their personal information sent to advertisers -- they
may have to start paying real money for online
services.
Kennish plans to devote six months to developing
Disconnect and will reevaluate then whether it could
be a sustainable business.
He's "pretty close" to releasing an extension for
Safari and recently began working on one for
Firefox, he said. If he's forced to abandon the
project, the source code is freely available to any
enterprising developers who want to take up the
cause.
"The only business model I see," Kennish said, is to
eventually provide a more advanced version of the
software that costs money.
"When I use something like Google, I'm paying for
Google with my attention and my data," he said.
"There's no such thing as free. These are companies
that have to pay employees' salaries."
Parts of Google's maturing business may clash with
some of the wide-eyed engineers it hopes to attract,
especially those passionate about taking risks to
change the world, hopefully for the better.
But a Google spokesman, who declined to comment
on most questions pertaining to this story, said the
company's attrition rate -- that is, the percentage of
employees that defect -- hasn't changed in more
than seven years and is better than the industry
standard.
In addition to all the on-campus amenities, a
program called "20% Time" lets Google engineers
devote a sizable chunk of their work weeks to
projects of their choosing. (Kennish said he
developed Facebook Disconnect after work hours.)
The perks haven't stopped some high-profile people
from leaving the company.
Product designer Douglas Bowman left in a huff last
year for a job at Twitter after reportedly becoming
fed up with nearly three years of what he publicly
described as Google's design-by-committee
mentality.
Some notable Google alumni are spiting their former
employer in a different way -- by joining Facebook.
The social network is perceived by some as
Google's biggest rival. People are spending more of
their time online using Facebook. They're thumbing
through photos and asking questions to friends,
rather than searching the wider Web. Google is
unable to crawl most of the data posted to
Facebook.
As Google-to-Facebook defections grow, Google is
reportedly offering some employees multimillion-
dollar packages to convince them not to go to
Facebook.
After wooing executives who worked on Google-
owned YouTube, Android and advertising; the
architect of Google Maps; and at least two Gmail co-
founders, this week, Facebook claimed Paul Adams,
a former Google employee who was previously an
outspoken critic of the social network. Sheryl
Sandberg, Facebook's venerable chief operating
officer, also came from the big G.
But abandoning Google hasn't always proved to be
a wise or permanent move. Anna Patterson left the
company in 2007 to start a rival search engine called
Cuil. When that tanked, she returned to Google in
September.